Lyotropic liquid crystal (LLC) assemblies have garnered widespread attention in disparate areas of chemistry, by virtue of their utility in highly selective chemical separations such as water desalination and selective ion-transporting membranes, as templates for mesoporous inorganic materials, as media for biophysical studies of transmembrane proteins (“cubic lipidic phases”), as therapeutic nucleic acid delivery vehicles, and as ion transporting media for advanced fuel cells and batteries. LLCs arise from the concentration-dependent supramolecular self-assembly of small molecule surfactants in water to form nanostructured materials with structurally periodic aqueous and hydrophobic domains ranging in size from approximately 10-100 Å. Bicontinuous LLCs are especially coveted for their interpenetrating aqueous and hydrophobic nanodomains with tunable nanopore diameters (approximately 7-50 Å) lined with well-defined pore wall functionalities that percolate over macroscopic distances. These specific attributes render them useful as potential separations membrane materials.
In U.S. Pat. No. 8,834,743, a new family of anionic gemini surfactants and LLCs formed from the anionic gemini surfactants and a solvent were described. The anionic gemini surfactants readily form bicontinuous LLC phases. In U.S. Publication No. 2013/0190417, polymerizable analogs of the anionic gemini surfactants and their self-assembly into LLCs as well as crosslinked membrane forms were described. While the LLCs formed from the polymerizable anionic gemini surfactants are well-suited for their intended purpose, a disadvantage is the chemical synthesis process which can require multiple steps and can take up to several days to produce a large scale amount of surfactant from which the LLC is derived. What are needed are improved methods of making polymerizable LLCs and the LLC membranes produced using these methods.